FILM REVIEW; A Dysfunctional Family With Wounds Exposed

For all the bullying inspirational slogans hurled at us about never giving up on your dream, following your bliss and today being the first day of the rest of your life, the fact remains that most people's lives run on fairly narrow tracks. And in the real world, as opposed to self-help fantasyland, once you find yourself on a track, it's awfully hard to get off, even if it's headed nowhere in particular.

The way so many lives coast along on familiar but frustrating paths is one of the themes of ''You Can Count on Me,'' the perfectly pitched directorial debut of the playwright (''This Is Your Youth'') and screenwriter (''Analyze This!'') Kenneth Lonergan.

Because it arrives near the end of one of the most dismal film seasons in memory, this melancholy little gem of a movie, which won two major awards at the Sundance Festival, qualifies as one of the two or three finest American films released this year. If nothing better comes along between now and the end of December, it could reap some more honors.

What distinguishes ''You Can Count on Me'' from almost every other recent American film is its modesty. Although visually handsome, it is about the furthest thing from an event movie and would fit as comfortably on television as it does on the big screen. Its biggest strength is a steadfast integrity that sharpens as the story goes along. Steering clear of the shrill melodramatic confrontations and kitschy spiritual uplift that Hollywood routinely confuses with profundity, it proposes no pat solutions for its characters' problems. One significant character, a likable but cautious young boy, is the refreshing antithesis of the psychically gifted, problem-solving superchild that is becoming one of Hollywood's most obnoxious cliches.

''You Can Count on Me'' is an exquisitely observed slice of upstate New York life that reminds us there are still plenty of American communities where the pace is more human than computer-driven. The movie dares to portray small-town middle-class life in America as somewhat drab and predictable. Without ever condescending to its characters, it trusts that the everyday problems of ordinary people, if portrayed with enough knowledge, empathy and insight, can be as compelling as the most bizarre screaming carnival on ''The Jerry Springer Show.''

The two main characters, Samantha and Terry Prescott (Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo), are a grown-up brother and sister who reunite after not having seen each other for some time. Samantha (known as Sammy), a single mother with an 8-year-old son, Rudy (Rory Culkin), works as a loan officer in a bank in the fictional New York town of Scottsville. A quiet, slightly wilted place with a sleepy main street whose vitality hasn't entirely been co-opted by shopping malls, it is a typical middle-to-working-class New York State community. Country music dominates the local jukeboxes, and the soundtrack serves up a generous helping of Steve Earle's country-rock.

Samantha and Terry share a childhood trauma, recalled in the film's opening scenes, of having lost both parents in a car accident when they were very young. In remembering this event the film exercises a stunning restraint. We see the parents having a banal conversation in the car moments before the accident and then the looming disaster. Cut to an anxious policeman about to bear the horrible news to the children who have been waiting at home. Sparing us their reaction, the movie cuts to the sermon at the parents' funeral service, where we see the priest's lips moving while no words are heard on the soundtrack except for the ethereal cry of a children's choir.

These early scenes demonstrate an unerring sense (one shared by the best screenplays) of when it is best to leave things to the imagination. And as Ms. Linney's and Mr. Ruffalo's grown-up Samantha and Terry reunite, quarrel and reminisce, you retain a lingering image of the two of them as children, silently clinging to each other, still mute with shock.

In their beautifully harmonized performances, Ms. Linney and Mr. Ruffalo evoke this sibling bond with an astounding depth and subtlety. Ms. Linney's Samantha may be a responsible mother and churchgoing Catholic, but we learn that she was a wild teenager who has had to choke back her rebellious instincts in order to bring up her son. Even now, her innate rebelliousness still manifests itself in ways both small (she secretly smokes cigarettes) and large (she recklessly initiates an affair with her new boss, a persnickety straight arrow with a pregnant wife).

Mr. Ruffalo's Terry is a classic overgrown adolescent. A good-hearted drifter with a perversely self-destructive streak, he has recently spent time in prison after a bar brawl and has also impregnated a suicidally inclined girlfriend in Worcester, Mass. The main reason for his visit to Scottsville is to borrow money from his sister to deal with the situation. Samantha is furious and disappointed by her brother's lack of direction and behavioral sloppiness. He in turn is contemptuous of her for remaining stuck in Scottsville, whose small-town atmosphere he finds suffocating.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Terry stays on longer than he had planned and further infuriates Samantha with his irresponsible treatment of Rudy, who instantly gravitates toward him as a father figure. One evening, as a boyish prank, they sneak out to a pool hall while Samantha is away; later they are caught lying about it.

Samantha, in the meantime, finds herself torn between a sudden marriage proposal from her on-again, off-again boyfriend Bob (Jon Tenney) and her foolish affair with her boss, Brian (Matthew Broderick), who is instantly besotted. On the job Brian is a gray-faced, passive-aggressive company man and stickler for rules who is so obsessed with appearances that he issues an edict forbidding his employees to use loud colors on their computer screens.

The culminating event, an excruciating, brilliantly executed scene of emotional chaos as old personal wounds are ripped open, is Terry's impulsive, ill-advised decision to take Rudy on a surprise visit to meet his roughneck biological father (Josh Lucas) whom Samantha has built up as a hero to the boy. Mr. Ruffalo's star-making performance deserves to be added to the list of charismatic, grownup lost boys that includes the Marlon Brando of ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' and the Jack Nicholson of ''Easy Rider.''

Talking in a slightly dazed drawl, bursts of anger occasionally flashing through a manner that suggests the defensive, semi-apologetic attitude of a boy trying to please his strict mother, Terry is a softer, contemporary version of this archetype. He is the kind of man women instinctively want to rescue, only to discover a maddening obstinacy lurking beneath his appealing boyish surface.

''You Can Count on Me'' makes some slight missteps. In an otherwise scrupulously realistic movie, Mr. Broderick's Brian borders uncomfortably on caricature. But in countless other small but telling ways, the movie gets its characters and their world exactly and indelibly right.

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan; director of photography, Stephen Kazmierski; edited by Anne McCabe; music by Lesley Barber; production designer, Michael Shaw; produced by John N. Hart, Jeffrey Sharp, Larry Meistrich and Barbara De Fina; released by Paramount Classics. Running time: 111 minutes. This film is rated R.